Gothic Horror In The Yellow Wallpaper

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In the short story “ The Yellow Wallpaper”, the theme of gothic horror is displayed. The narrator lives with her husband John and is confined to an upstairs room due to her fragile mental health. Her health worsens throughout the story as she obsesses over the yellow wallpaper surrounding the room. The narrator is convinced that there is a woman behind the wallpaper, and eventually removes the wallpaper to free the “woman” trapped. This indicates her mental instability through her belief that there is actually a woman trapped behind the yellow wallpaper. There are a few key components in this story starting with how unreliable the narrator is, symbolism, protagonist, point of view, and theme. The narrator is very unreliable due to the fact that she has mixed feelings on everything. She can’t come up with a direct decision on something without always changing her mind. For example, she changes her mind on the way she feels about John. Sometimes John says that she wont recover and that he might need to send her away, but than sometimes John will say that she is recovering very good and she continues to improve. She is the exact same way, sometimes she says she is doing terrible, gets…show more content…
The wallpaper seems to fascinate the narrator with its unpleasant look and pattern. After staring at the wallpaper for hours, the narrator in her eyes notices an outline of a ghost figure behind the wallpaper that’s only visible in certain light. Over time, the pattern comes into focus as a desperate woman trying to escape from the wallpaper. The wallpaper also symbolizes a cage, keeping the woman from escaping. It’s pretty clear the wallpaper overall represents the tradition in which the narrator finds herself and the “woman” trapped, and the domestic life that traps women. She finally tears down the wallpaper and over time believes that she broken out of wallpaper in which John has trapped her
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